Thursday, December 15, 2016

A Teacher for All Occasions: Arthur E. Grant, Greenwich Country Day

In researching our index for an interesting subject
to highlight this month, we came across one of our early interviews about a
teacher at Greenwich Country Day School. Arthur E. Grant, interviewed by Cecie
Munkenbeck in 1976, was a young man of 33 when he was hired by John Lynn Minor,
founding headmaster.

Below is an account of the Grant interview by
Greenwich Oral Project volunteer, Olivia Luntz, Greenwich High School senior
and member of the National Honor Society. Olivia is pleased to announce she
will be attending Amherst College in the fall.

Long-time
teacher at Greenwich Country Day School, Arthur E. Grant, recalls a Greenwich
few would recognize today and one that he made rewarding and fun for his
students when he taught there from 1932-1966. When Grant first arrived at
Greenwich Country Day School, after teaching for ten years at King School in
Stamford, he and his wife moved into an old hayloft above what is now the
school’s gymnasium.
With some love and labor, the hayloft was turned into a beautiful apartment
that was known as “The
Ritz,” which Grant
and his wife called home for the next thirty-four years. During his time living
in The Ritz,Grant
formed close relationships with the children he taught and also witnessed and
experienced significant changes, both within the school and the world outside.
For example, during World War Two Grant recalls how he and his wife “were overrun
with children.” Since gasoline was hard to come by, transportation became a
problem, and so parents would leave their children at the school, making it
necessary for the Grants to house them. “There would be eight or nine children
staying with us overnight during the week, they slept on cots in the dining
room.” In spite of
the chaos, Grant admits to “awfully good times with those children.”

Students and Faculty, 1926

Along
with opening up his apartment to his students, Grant also hosted many of his
students at his family’s home in Maine. Grant was born in Maine in 1899 and
only left the state in the fall of 1922 to start his first year teaching at the
King School in Stamford. He returned to Maine every summer and worked for the
Department of Agriculture inspecting blueberries. Grant would invite some of
his students to accompany him to Maine “and the boys were allowed to live
just about as they would in camp. We had a separate building for them to sleep
in, and they played in the river a great deal and went fishing about
everyday….I used to take them on hikes and hunting trips and fishing trips, and
they loved that.” The
boys even got paid to help with picking blueberries. Grant believes that these
summers in Maine were very beneficial to the boys he taught, as they were able
to see how people outside of Greenwich lived and learned how to organize things
by themselves. Grant specifically recalls one boy who “went up to
Maine with us for years and years. He came up there when he was about eight or
nine years old, and the last time he came was between exams and when he
graduated from Princeton … some
years he’d be sitting
on the doorstep when we got there.”

Back
in Greenwich, Grant helped to host parties and other events for his students.
For example, he describes one Halloween party he planned with Mrs. Stillman
Rockefeller that was held underneath The Ritz.“She had the most fantastic set-ups….I’ll never
forget those children that evening going through those ‘chambers of
horrors’ that she set
up….She had gone down to the markets downtown and had bought a whole big basket
full of bones, animal bones….She had the intestines of chickens and all that sort
of thing.”
He
goes on to describe the room: “It
was dark as midnight in there. No light at all….The children came in one door
and went out another. So they had to pass through this labyrinth, and come in
contact with all these many things….It was just terrible because I remember
hearing those screams. Mrs. Rockefeller had great fun, too!” Grant and
Mrs. Rockefeller, along with planning many memorable parties, also helped the
school by replacing the school’s
wooden flagpole, which was being drilled by woodpeckers, with a new steel pole.
“It will
always be there, I hope,” Grant adds.

Another
event at the school that Grant remembers fondly was the school’s pet show. “We raised
money putting on a pet show each year. I’ll always remember seeing Stillman
Rockefeller coming on the grounds with two large shoats (small pigs) on the end
of a rope.”
He
then goes on to describe the other animals that frequented the pet show, “Horses,
ponies, cats, snakes, toads, mice. Anything you can think of. We had all sorts
of prizes.”
Some
of the money raised in the pet show went to sponsor the training of a Seeing
Eye dog, and the dog they paid to have trained was known as the “Greenwich
Country Day Dog.”
In addition, Grant recalls the school’s Field Day, which they called “Fun
Day.” One year, another teacher suggested to Grant “Why don’t you dress
up as a Russian woman of great renown and a great athlete and come to the
school to play with the mothers against the boys in the softball game?” Posters were
hung up around the school of this Russian athlete that was coming to Greenwich
and there “was great
excitement.” Grant
describes arriving in a limousine ceremoniously, wearing “a great flowing robe,”
successfully cloaking his identity as well. He then describes his turn at bat after
the first two innings: “Well, I hit the ball way out in the field, and ran like
the old boy around those bases. And, when I got to third base, I pulled that
string. Everything dropped but my shorts, and here I was standing. Well the
kids nearly mobbed me.”

Along with Halloween, the school also
celebrated Thanksgiving every year with plays. “We had all the turkeys and the
Pilgrims and everything else that went with it. And costumes. Everything. I
carried on those Thanksgiving plays as long as I was there.” Another
holiday that was important at the school was, of course, Christmas. In the
early years of being a teacher Grant got a Christmas tree for his apartment and
would invite his students to help decorate it. He recalled how “the children
got the biggest kick out of doing the decorating of that tree; and they loved
it.” Grant
started getting trees for the school’s foyer and then decided “we should
have a nice big Christmas tree in the library right at the end of the reading
table.” Grant was
then informed that it was a fire hazard to have trees inside a school building,
but that did not stop him or the school’s headmaster at the time, Mr.
Webster. So the next year Mr. Webster contacted a friend who said, “Go ahead and
wire that big spruce that’s
outside, and I’ll
pay the bills.” This
started the tradition of the outdoor Christmas tree, which is lighted every
year. Other winter fun included the sledding hill, started by the middle
school. “It went all
the way down across the lower field to the other street that goes down back of
the gym.” Grant notes that he and the teachers would “go out there
evenings at nine o’clock
and ice it, sprinkle it so the kids could have a good toboggan slide the next
day.”

Headmaster John R. Webster, morning assembly, 1949

Off
campus Grant recalls taking his class every year to the Statue of Liberty along
with the Botanical Gardens and museums in New York. “I remember
one year we went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and went on board a battleship and
had dinner on board, and the boys all came back with sailor hats.” Grant also
recalls the project he helped start for children who were not interested in
sports, for “all these little youngsters who had little or no athletic ability
or cared less about athletics.” The school bus would take them in the
afternoons to the Edgar Mead property where they worked on a cabin. As Grant
describes it, “They had to cut the trees, make the logs. They built the whole
thing from the ground up.” The
children were instructed by Pop Wierum, and once the cabin was finished, the
school would have a party and barbecue there. Grant says, “I think we built the cabin up and
tore it down three times. You know different groups, different years.”

In
addition to all the fun and excitement, Grant witnessed many changes in the
school over the years, including the merging of Country Day with Rosemary, a
girls’ school. Grant describes the joining as “a headache!” Conflicts
arose because Rosemary had a more progressive approach than Country Day’s
conservative one and because teachers from the different schools found it difficult
to get along. In an attempt to remedy the problem, the headmaster of school,
Charlie Buell, declared, there would be no faculty meetings, “if this is
the way it’s going to
be,” Overall, it was a chaotic first year, but Grant recognized there were
advantages, remarking that the girls “had a great deal to offer to our school.” Grant was to witness
many more changes along the way, not the least of which was growth. He recalls, “I could call
every child by name who was in the school, but after it got so large, I couldn’t do that.”
Grant laments the change, saying, “that was the one thing I didn’t like, not
knowing the children well enough.” In his early days of teaching, Grant was
in charge of one group of students. He taught every subject other than music,
but after Rosemary and the increase in enrollment, each teacher could only
teach one subject.

Overall,
Grant recalled his days as a teacher with great fondness, even though it was a
twenty-four hour job. “But
we had lots and lots of fun, and that seemed to be the whole note of enthusiasm
that ran through the school. It was a big family, and everybody was having lots
of fun.” He comments
in his interview that he and his wife had “many, many fond remembrances of
Greenwich….I’ll always
say that some of the finest people in the world live in Greenwich.”

Arthur
E. Grant died November 13, 1993, in
Machias, Maine.

Cecie
Munkenbeck died this year on August 17. She was 96 years old.

Cecie Munkenbeck, photo: Wilton Bulletin

The
interview of Arthur E. Grant, “The Greenwich Country Day School,” April 12,
1976, is available through the Oral History Project office on the lower level
of the library or in the reference area, on the first floor.